Research

This website was created during the Spring semester of 2020 by the students in the Humanities Lab AR393 Museum Practicum – The L.C. Bates Museum: History and Collections, taught by Professor Véronique Plesch.

Generously supported by a grant from Colby’s Center for the Arts and Humanities, this hands-on, experiential Humanities Lab took Colby students beyond the confines of the campus and allowed them to collaborate with an important local institution.

In the course of the semester, students learned about museums and museum displays, about web design and tailoring websites to audiences, about outreach and museum education. The eleven students in the class came from a wide range of departments, with majors and minors not only in Art History, but also in Biology, Cinema Studies, Creative Writing, Educational Studies, Environmental Science, Geology, Government, History, Managerial Economics, Neuroscience, Psychology, Sociology, Spanish, Studio Art, and Theater and Dance. As a result, they were able to contribute their varied knowledge and interests, putting them at the service of this truly encyclopedic museum. In addition to creating the website, the class also contributed scholarly research: the website includes essays on different aspects of the museum, such as its educational function, and on its collections—the dioramas and the work of Charles Hubbard, the marine room, the mineral collection, the printing presses, the carriages, and a Chinese root sculpture.

The class received invaluable assistance from Mark Wardecker and Ellen Freeman from Academic Information Technology Services, Kara Kugelmeyer, Assistant Director of Research and Instruction and Data and Science Librarian, and from Lyndell Bade, Biology Laboratory Instructor, who oversees the displays of the Biology department. John Meader put at our service the photos he took in early 2020. We are grateful to all of them and of course to Deborah Staber, without whom this project would not have been possible.